Using the premise set forth by Roland Barthes that “food signifies,” this thesis analyzes immigrant fiction and how diasporized peoples construct and perform their identities along class, gender,...Show moreUsing the premise set forth by Roland Barthes that “food signifies,” this thesis analyzes immigrant fiction and how diasporized peoples construct and perform their identities along class, gender, and ethnic lines. The first chapter unpacks and presents food culture theory as a meaningful tool to analyze works of literature. The subsequent two chapters apply food culture theory and its role in identity production through a close reading of T.C. Boyle’s novel The Tortilla Curtain (1995) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collection Unaccustomed Earth (2013). In both, food behavior of the migrants exemplifies the ongoing vacillation between the desire for assimilation and rejection of the host culture. Moreover, the various foodways presented in the works show how food consumption can signify a divide or exemplify a struggle to reconcile public and private identities.Show less
In a time where illness could often not be explained from a medical perspective, those who fell ill sought to find the meaning of their suffering elsewhere. Today, many illnesses, ailments and...Show moreIn a time where illness could often not be explained from a medical perspective, those who fell ill sought to find the meaning of their suffering elsewhere. Today, many illnesses, ailments and pains can be explained in medical terms, but biomedicine does not seem to allow many, if any, other narratives to coexist with the restitution narrative. Illness as a lived experience goes beyond the purely medical and clinical terms that define it, illness is more than an occasion to practise medicine; it is an occasion to practise humanity and perhaps this is what best defines the field of medical humanities and what becomes clear in John Donne’s and Timothy Roger’s illness narratives.Show less
Chapter 1 – Introduction & Methodology Such modern classic horror films as The Exorcist (1973), Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Don’t Look Now (1973) probe deeply into our fears, playing on them to...Show moreChapter 1 – Introduction & Methodology Such modern classic horror films as The Exorcist (1973), Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Don’t Look Now (1973) probe deeply into our fears, playing on them to provoke genuine re- sponses of terror. Beyond that, fictional horror has an impact on modern culture through con- sumption. It is a common belief that overconsumption of horror leads directly to real-world vio- lence and terror (Cooper 8). Others feel that critical arguments “that find violent fictions culpable for real-life violence are problematically deterministic: they strip agency away from the vio- lence’s human perpetrators and assign it to inanimate causal factors” (Cooper 8). As such, it is necessary to analyze works of modern horror in order to understand this blurring of reality and fiction within the genre, not only to understand horror’s place within the creative context of film but also to understand the role that horror plays in understanding ourselves and the world around us. The type of horror that is most associated with this blurring of reality and fiction is found nestled within postmodernism. Postmodern horror succeeds at playing on our fears as the “uni- verse of the contemporary horror film is an uncertain one in which good and evil, normality and abnormality, reality and illusion become virtually indistinguishable” (Pinedo, “Postmodern Ele- ments” 85). Postmodern horror plays on the viewer’s fear that they are themselves a monster – they see elements of their personality reflected in the character of the villain on the screen. This thesis focuses on the blurring of the distinction between being human and being a monster, or between good and evil, in postmodern horror cinema and critically explores the creation of the postmodern monster, which is not the “Other” but contains recognizable elements of ourselves.Show less
This thesis analyses the function and meaning of the depiction of landscapes in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho in relation to contemporary paintings, the emergence of the Gothic as a...Show moreThis thesis analyses the function and meaning of the depiction of landscapes in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho in relation to contemporary paintings, the emergence of the Gothic as a genre, and the notions of the picturesque, the beautiful and the sublime.Show less
Drawing on Upheavals of Thought; The Intelligence of Emotions (2001), a book by classical scholar and public intellectual Martha Nussbaum on the ethical value of emotions, this study investigated,...Show moreDrawing on Upheavals of Thought; The Intelligence of Emotions (2001), a book by classical scholar and public intellectual Martha Nussbaum on the ethical value of emotions, this study investigated, in a chronological treatment of W.B. Yeats’s lyrical poetry, what views on suffering and compassion transpire from Yeats’s work during the early stages of his poetical development, up until he immersed himself late 1902/early 1903 in the work of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and by what these views may have been informed. Because much of Yeats’s work is openly or covertly autobiographical, dealing with the latter issue involved paying close attention to the development of Yeats’s personality, to the time and circumstances in which the poems were drafted or revised, and to both the people whose views may have significantly influenced Yeats’s emotional make-up and intellectual mind-set at the time, and those with whose suffering and misfortune Yeats was confronted. The focus of this study has been on the lyrical poems Yeats wrote (and cared to preserve) up to the publication of his collection Into the Seven Woods in 1903.Show less
Combining Stephen Greenblatt's concept of Renaissance self-fashioning and Kevin Sharpe's analysis of the performative authority of the Tudor monarchs, this thesis examines the way in which the...Show moreCombining Stephen Greenblatt's concept of Renaissance self-fashioning and Kevin Sharpe's analysis of the performative authority of the Tudor monarchs, this thesis examines the way in which the political self-fashioning of Queen Elizabeth I specifically is figured within both parts of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine. The first three chapters outline the various ways in which Elizabeth effected this self-fashioning (through language and rhetoric; image, spectacle and symbol; and the instrumentilisation of concepts of religion and empire) and detail how these methods are used by Tamburlaine within the play to create his own authority. The fourth chapter then turns to the question of whether this necessarily makes Tamburlaine a subversive play, ultimately concluding that, although the mimicry of the monarch is surely deliberate, the answer lies in the reaction of the audience to the text.Show less
